RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)

  • Republicans Ask SCOTUS to Block California Re-Gerrymander

    Source: US News & World Report

    “California Republicans asked the U.S. Supreme Court on ‌Tuesday ​to intervene in a bid to prevent the ‌state from using a new congressional map designed to give the Democrats five more seats in the U.S. ​House of Representatives. The state Republican Party and other challengers filed an emergency request asking the Supreme Court to block California’s new map, which was endorsed by voters as ‍a counterweight to a similar redistricting effort ​in Texas aimed at boosting Republicans. A federal court on January 14 rejected the argument by the challengers that California illegally used race in redrawing the ​boundaries of the congressional ⁠districts.” (01/20/26)

    https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2026-01-20/republicans-ask-us-supreme-court-to-block-california-voting-map

  • Meta lays off hundreds in Seattle area

    Source: Seattle Times

    “Meta is laying off 331 workers in the Puget Sound region as part of broader cuts to its virtual reality division. The Facebook parent company last week said that it was cutting about 10% of its 15,000-employee Reality Labs division as it shifts resources away from what it called the metaverse to wearables like smart glasses. … Reality Labs has been a key part of Meta’s postpandemic growth in the Seattle area. … Meta’s layoffs are the latest to hit the local tech industry over the past year of cuts, including some made by the company in October that hit its artificial intelligence teams.” (01/20/26)

    https://archive.is/SUZLa

  • Mexico: Regime sends 37 alleged cartel members to US in latest attempt to appease Trump

    Source: ABC News

    “Mexico’s security minister said Tuesday that it had sent another 37 members of Mexican drug cartels to the United States, as the Trump administration ratchets up pressure on governments to crack down on criminal networks it says are smuggling drugs across the border. Mexican Security Minister Omar García Harfuch wrote in a social media post on X that the people transferred were ‘high impact criminals’ that ‘represented a real threat to the country’s security.’ It is the third time in less than one year that Mexico has sent detained cartel members to the U.S. as the country attempts to offset mounting threats by U.S.” (01/20/26)

    https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/mexico-sends-37-cartel-members-us-latest-offer-129390809

  • Global markets on alert as Europe to suspend approval of US trade deal

    Source: BBC News [UK State Media]

    “The European Parliament is planning to suspend approval of the US trade deal agreed in July, according to sources close to its international trade committee. The suspension is set to be announced in Strasbourg, France on Wednesday. The move would mark another escalation in tensions between the US and Europe, as Donald Trump ratchets up his efforts to acquire Greenland, threatening new tariffs over the issue on the weekend. The stand-off has rattled financial markets, reviving talk of a trade war and the possibility of retaliation against the US for its trade measures. Shares on both sides of the Atlantic were lower on Tuesday, with European stock markets seeing a second day of losses. In the US, the Dow Jones slid more than 1.7%, while the S&P 500 dropped more than 2% and the Nasdaq closed about 2.4% lower.” (01/21/26)

    https://archive.is/OFxx4


  • With Trade Deal, Canada Bets on China

    Source: Foreign Policy
    by James Palmer

    “Last Friday, Canada and China struck a preliminary trade deal that would open the Canadian market to Chinese electric vehicles and lower Chinese retaliatory tariffs on key Canadian agricultural exports. … The deal will undoubtedly revive accusations of malign Chinese influence and Canadian perfidy from U.S. right-wingers and China hawks. But a year into Trump’s second term, moving closer to Beijing makes perfect sense for Ottawa, as well as the European Union. … Put bluntly, a relatively rational autocracy with limited, stable foreign-policy goals located an ocean away may seem preferable to a country run by an erratic autocrat next door. In this respect, the ongoing Greenland crisis has given Canada’s leaders brutal clarity about the United States as it is, not as it was or as they want it to be.” (01/20/26)

    https://archive.is/JBeW0

  • We’d Have Been Committed for Predicting Half of What Trump Has Done

    Source: The UnPopulist
    by Jacob Grier

    “Today marks the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. We thought it would be the perfect occasion to look back at some of the low-lights of Year 1 of Trump 2.0 and imagine the diagnosis that the self-proclaimed cool heads would have ascribed to us Trump worrywarts if we had predicted even a fraction of what His Orange Eminence and Wannabe Nobel Peace Laureate went on to do. Actually, we know their diagnosis because they were not shy about telling us.” (01/20/26)

    https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/wed-have-been-committed-for-predicting

  • “Might Makes Right” Will Not Be Effective, Even in the Western Hemisphere

    Source: Independent Institute
    by Ivan Eland

    “‘The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must’ is a quote that has come down through the ages from the Greek historian Thucydides’[s] History of the Peloponnesian War, written in 416 BC. It has come to encapsulate the ‘might makes right’ philosophy in international relations and is embraced by some in the realist school of foreign policy. Such realists are mostly right about how the world still works, but have a PR problem in today’s milieu of woke platitudes in international relations. Despite the fact that the balance of power and spheres of influence still shape the worldview of the vast majority of global leaders, some of these strong countries usually dress up the reasons for their military interventions in terms of democratization, humanitarian ends, or their national security.” (01/20/26)

    https://www.independent.org/article/2026/01/20/trump-greenland-foreign-policy/

  • Greenland, Minnesota, Army-Navy game: Another day, another emergency

    Source: Washington Post
    by George F Will

    “As usual, today’s president, coming late to a long-standing problem, but presuming his original discovery of it, has made himself the issue. His acquisitiveness regarding Greenland has nothing to do with national security, and everything to do, as everything always does, with his fragile ego. He is pouting, and threatening aggression, because he has not received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Danes can perhaps take comfort from the fact that the president is contemplating military operations against another northern place. As this is being written, the Army is reportedly readying a potential deployment to Minnesota to quell disturbances stemming from ham-handed activities by the ludicrously — and lethally — militarized U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During all this, the president has announced he will order that no other football game can be televised during the annual Army-Navy game.” (01/20/26)

    https://archive.is/pYGtE

  • No, you can’t make students stand for the Pledge of Allegiance

    Source: Expression
    by helloiamcarrie

    “For more than 80 years, the law has been clear. The government can’t force public school children to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. One Tennessee school was either oblivious to this settled First Amendment principle or chose to ignore it. But thanks to a letter from FIRE, the school district has stepped in and promised to investigate.” (01/20/26)

    https://expression.fire.org/p/no-you-cant-make-students-stand-for

  • If You Own Nothing, the Real Owners Don’t Have to Care Whether You’re Happy

    Source: Garrison Center
    by Thomas L Knapp

    “In my opinion, if I pay to own something, I’ve paid to own all the things it can do … assuming I can figure out how to make it do those things. The manufacturers of ”owned,’ but with subscription-only features’ goods, though, frown on homebrew tinkerers jail-breaking those products instead of forking over cash in perpetuity. And they’ve got ‘intellectual property’ law on their side. They don’t have to care about your happiness.” (01/20/26)

    https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20278